User blog:Muhlakai/What's in my army? Feb 22, 2015
One of the biggest challenges for new players (or old players new to the beta) is what their army is generally going to consist of. This was a slightly easier task in the alpha with the fewer quantity of units available. The units can vary only slightly in their utility for a variety of tasks, and finding the fit that works best for you can be tricky, especially when you add in the sheer quantity of gear that can also make subtle adjustments. This post is first in a series where I will discuss what I've currently got in my primary army and why. Hopefully this will help people learn the mindset needed to build a coherent and effective army more quickly. Right now I've really only got one army setup that I think of as "my" army. It's not the only one that I'm playing, but anything other than my main army right now is only for levelling units to experiment with different specs. (...like the longbow I really need to try in this army itself!) Current Army Asterisks denote which units are the front line, as opposed to reinforcements. Units So why a Zwei in the front and Phalanx in the back as opposed to a shield in one or both places? I use the Zwei to either pummel someone or snag a CP early on. I'm not expecting massive survival. I want damage dealt and I want it dealt NOW. It puts some pressure on the opponent to react and I'd rather have them react to me than work out their own strategy. The Phalanx is what I pull in when I need a physical barrier for screening or an extra body to snag and hold an unguarded CP. He's got more survivability than a shield if the opponent realizes I'm capping the last CP and needs to beat the everloving snot out of my unit if he wants to keep me from winning. The Phalanx can survive long enough to pull over a friendly for support. I have the catphract (not its real name) instead of a regular horsie because I tend to rush it deep in someone's field to whack a gorillaphant or archer sitting out by its lonesome. While I'm pretty successful at bagging a soft target this way the opponent tends to regroup and start beating up my 'phract before I can get a support unit out there. The 'phract is buff enough that I can take out the soft target, suffer the hits, and still live to run away and fight another day. In general I pull the Phalanx out first to take up the slack from losing either the zwei or the 'phract. Then the doc comes out second to keep the phalanx healthy. The gorillaphant is often (though not always) last because it's a great source of damage to help me pull an edge out if we're down to the last few units. As I note below, a longbow might be a better choice for this. We'll see when I get one. It seems likely that I would also pull a longbow out sooner, particularly if I've managed my zwei and 'phract health well. Gear It's probably obvious that I don't really have any fancy gear. The only rare gear I have is the Helm on the phalanx, and even that I'm not sure is worth it. I've played around a bit with different gear, like putting greaves on either the Zwei or the Phalanx. It seems to help the phalanx move up into position faster, but I usually find that I'm retreating units to regroup them behind the phalanx, so speed doesn't matter so much. Also, I like to bring the doc out to support the phalanx, so either way the Helm is a nice buff to the phalanx's otherwise wimpy attack. The vitality scepter is a minor tradeoff between how much the doc heals and how far away he does it. I can always move the doc closer; the difference in distance doesn't make it easier to screen the doctor. I have the launcher instead of the igniter or something else on the gorillaphant because I use it to cause damage to units fighting, rather than to burninate a pile of foes standing on a CP. That may not be the best strategy. Annathema has pointed out that there's not much difference between putting the launcher on and just using a longbow in the first place. For what I'm doing the longbow would probably be better, but I don't have one yet. I have plenty of gold and ember, but I may end up just waiting until I can spec one. The repeater could probably get something different like the Hellfire, but I can't afford one yet and I'm disinclined to buy tons of chests just to get the artifacts to build one. The Fletcher's Chest is up right now, but I don't want to spend ember and get artifacts. Playing the Army At first I would walk this army right up in my opponent's face and settle in for a brawl where I won by close maneuver and double-teaming opposing units. This is simply not a very feasible strategy in the beta. Unless the opponent is playing just the right kind of army (too many soft targets and not enough maneuvering capacity) it just didn't work very well. I didn't play this sort of army like that in the alpha, but the 3-up/3-down format makes large scale maneuvers much riskier, which had me thinking I needed to outmaneuver in the super-close game. Now what I tend to do is to move it up, take a pot shot at a soft target with the 'phract, then regroup farther back where I can get the zwei and the cav both beating up the same unit while it gets peppered by the repeater. I especially like to hit an opposing cav with a double-team like this because it quickly reduces their maneuverability, their cav usually aren't too slow to take down (see why I've got the 'phract in the first place plus the food gear), and then I have a short-term unit quantity advantage that I can try to exploit. By the time I pull the phalanx in I usually lose the zwei and have switched to screening the repeater with the 'phract while both retreat towards the new armor. Category:Blog posts Category:Army Management Category:Strategy